Question: I will be starting a group education program with school aged children in my county this fall and I found a book online that has some curriculum. The book I found was called Welcome to Friendship: A Course That Empowers Young People to Discover the Need For and Value of Positive Relationships (Lucky Duck Books) by John Street. I tried to find itonline through the library but came up empty handed and didn’t know if it is actually in the library and available for loan or not. Also, what would be a good way to search the library website to find some curriculum on the subject of friendship and group education? If you could help me out with this, that would be great because I’m somewhat at a loss as to what the best way to go about this is. I look forward to hearing from you!
Answer: Hi–you are right, Cornell does not own this book. You may request the item through interlibrary loan; more info on that at this webpage: http://www.mannlib.cornell.edu/faq/borrowing-and-delivery/interlibrary-loan/ill-cooperative-extension#15n332. Follow the link there to the library catalog, look up this book, and then select the interlibrary loan link. If Cornell can find the book at another lending library, we will get if for you at no cost. Mann Interlibrary Loan Service mails loans to your work address.
Regarding friendship curriculum material, I worked with my colleague Camille Andrews and we found a few things. The subject heading for the John Street book is Frienship: Study and Teaching, so we used that to locate similar books. A couple of interesting titles, including ” Storytime kit : friends” (http://cornell.worldcat.org/oclc/460989693) and ” Fair weather friend : a story about making friends” (http://cornell.worldcat.org/oclc/33152635). Neither of these are owned by Cornell, so you would need to request through interlibrary loan.
- Another subject heading in the catalog that looked useful was ” Friendship in children”; one title with this subject heading is ” What is friendship? : games and activities to help children to understand friendship.” (http://cornell.worldcat.org/oclc/316836273). Again, not owned by Cornell.
- Finally, another subject heading is Friendship Study and teaching (Elementary) Activity programs (http://cornell.worldcat.org/search?q=su:Friendship+Study+and+teaching+(Elementary)+Activity+programs.&qt=hot_subject). Some good titles there as well.
- Another potential source for curriculum ideas in this area is the Gateway to Educational Materials (http://www.thegateway.org/). I did a search for friendships and narrowed to activities, and got 12 results. Here’s the direct url: http://www.thegateway.org/portal_seamarksearch/makesearch?past=fulltext|friendship|contains|yes||*type|http://purl.oclc.org/gem/gemtype/Activity|||Activity|*
- In the Gateway to Educational Materials (now the Gateway to 21st Century Skills apparently), using Social skills and Emotional intelligence also brought up some useful results.
- If you look at ERIC (http://www.eric.ed.gov/) you’ll found that Friendship OR Social Behavior OR Interpersonal Relationship OR Interpersonal Competence are all descriptors as is Elementary School Students and Elementary Education. There were a fair number of hits with those and you can narrow down by Guides Classroom Teacher.
- Scholastic.com has a teachers’ resource area with lesson plans at http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/home.jsp and a search for friendship brought up a ton of lesson plans and activities divided by grade level.
- PBSTeachers also has a resource section: http://www.pbs.org/teachers/ and a search for friendship brought up some lesson plans and activities divided by grade level.
- We found through a Google Search for curriculum or lesson plan “emotional intelligence” some link to paid curricula like http://www.baatschools.com/primary_emotional_intelligence.php . In fact there are LOTS of lesson plan sites out there that are searchable–just google lesson plans to find them. If you put friendships into a site like The Educator’s Desk Reference (http://www.eduref.org/Virtual/Lessons/), you’ll get a few hits.
- Finally, Daniel Goleman, the originator of “emotional intelligence” as a concept, links to a company called 6second that puts out some school activity books (http://www.6seconds.org/tools/hwc.php).
Well, that’s probably enough to get you started! Please let me know if you need any further help with this or another research project.
do i conclude you would suggest we not open a machine in our office for general public use & access to these resources?